Pakistan, East Timor, and Indonesia – show much the same bloody manipulations.

It is equally the case that the killer regimes do not announce publicly the huge numbers killed, and rarely

boast about the massacres, let alone the tortures that usually accompany them. They like to create a set

of public euphemisms endlessly circulated through state-controlled mass media.

In the age of the United Nations, to which almost all nation-states belong, in the time of Amnesty

International and its uncountable NGO children and grandchildren, in the epoch of globalization and

the Internet, there are naturally worries about “face”, interventions, embargoes, ostracism, and UN-ish

investigations. No less important are domestic considerations.

National militaries are supposed heroically to defend the nation against foreign enemies, not

slaughter their fellow-citizens. Police are supposed to uphold the law. Above all, there is need for

political “stability”, one element of which is that killing should not get out of control, and that amateur

civilian killers should be quietly assured that “it’s over” and that no one will be punished.

But every norm has its exceptions. In the article that follows below, readers are invited to reflect on

Joshua Oppenheimer’s two recent sensational films about organized gangsters in and around the city

of Medan (in northeastern Sumatra) who played a key, but only local, role in the vast anti-communist

murders in Indonesia in the last months of 1965. [The two films are Jagal – its English title The Act of

Killing – and Sungai Ular, or River of Snakes]

Almost 50 years later, they happily boast about their killings, with the grimmest details, and relish

their complete immunity from any punishment. They are also happy to collaborate with Oppenheimer,

contribute to his films, create bizarre reenactments of 1965, and do not hesitate to dress up their

underlings to act as communists (male and female). The problem is to explain why Medan was the scene

of the exception, within the larger framework of Indonesian politics from the late colonial period to the

present.

The final irony is that Joshua’s (and the gangster’s) film is banned in Indonesia – that is to say, by Jakarta.

[1]

It is worth mentioning that in the early years after Suharto’s fall from power in 1998 (remembered as

the time of Reform) censorship of publications almost disappeared. Long-forbidden works by dead

communists – going back as far as the 1920s – were resurrected. Accounts by communist survivors

of their suffering in Suharto’s gulag circulated without being banned. A flood of conflicting analyses

of “what really happened in 1965” sold well, especially if they claimed that the secret masterminds of

the Gerakan 30 September were Suharto, the CIA, or MI-5.

It seems that the post-Suharto authorities assumed that the masses were not readers, and the

distribution of the books by the market would depend on the character of regional readers (say, plenty

in Java, very few in Medan). TV and the cinema were another story, since they appealed to large nonreading publics. Controversial films could arouse old and new hatreds and seriously threaten “stability”.

Typically, the notorious Suharto-era film about Gerakan 30 September – or G30S – year after year forced

on schoolchildren, was now silently taken out of circulation.

There is a jolting moment in Jean Rouch’s famous “anthropological” film Moi, Un Noir, about a small,

attractive group of young males from then French colonial Niger trying to find work in the more

prosperous, but still French colonial, Cote d’Ivoire. We see them periodically at work, but most of

the film shows them at leisure, drinking, joking, hooking up with women, so that the atmosphere is

generally lively and cheerful.

But toward the end, we find the main character, who calls himself Edward G Robinson (parallel to

a friend who names himself Lenny Caution), walking with a sidekick and an invisible Rouch along a

riverside levee. Quite suddenly he starts to re-enact for the camera an ugly scene from his real or

imagined past.

He was among the many francophone Africans who were sent as colonial cannon fodder to fight for

France against the Ho Chi Minh-led Viet Minh – before the fall of Dien Bien Phu. He seems to enjoy

replaying his bloody killing of captured Vietnamese. His sidekick pays no attention, making us realize

that he has seen this shtick many times and knows it by heart. So the brief show is meant for Rouch and

for us.

Once the scene is over, and the cheerful tone resumes, the viewer is immediately assaulted by the

obvious doubts and questions. Why did Rouch include this short scene in an otherwise friendly film? Did

Oumarou Ganda aka Edward G Robinson, who was Rouch’s main collaborator, insist upon it? Why did

the African perform this way, quite suddenly? Did he really do what he re-enacted?

Why the sudden turn from jokes to horror – and back? Did Rouch intend to situate the Niger boys of

that generation in the large framework of the ferocious decline and fall of France’s empire? Was Gonda

releasing a kind of frustration about his life, and resentment of the French, perhaps even of his patron

and friend, the famous Rouch?

When I watched the film, some years ago, it occurred to me that the crucial motif to think about was